I remember watching it as a kid, cuddled up on my couch trying to pre-avoid the jump-scares. The most surprising part for me was how few...
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The original was posted on /r/horror by /u/Impossible_Spend_787 on 2025-06-15 06:58:08+00:00.

I remember watching it as a kid, cuddled up on my couch trying to pre-avoid the jump-scares. The most surprising part for me was how few jump-scares there actually are. It wasn’t nearly as scary as the horror flicks of its time, and yet it left a deep impact.

Rewatching as an adult, I’m impressed by how well it set the tone, and how it slowly delves deeper into its own seriousness and terror. The first 30 minutes almost feels like a hokey acknowledgement to how silly the premise is. But 30 minutes later, you’re completely immersed in its story and the mystery of what’s going on.

The depth of the mystery is something of sheer beauty. The pacing is fantastic, you reach Day 7 at barely the halfway mark and even then it feels like you’ve only uncovered an inch of the full truth. Gore Verbinski seems to encode every shot with the perfect mix of proverbial storytelling and tension. It feels classic but leaves so much to the imagination.

Hans’ score is a perfect addition also. Something about the longing simplicity of the themes and the melodic chaos of the stringed instruments gives the whole thing a wiry depth of anxiousness.

It’s also a perfect example of telling rather than showing. The actual horror is shown in millisecond intervals, and only twice. What the victims actually look like, is basically hidden from the movie entirely. Instead, we’re left to wonder about their fates. The faces of the dead are pretty much the most interesting and terrifying aspect of the world that’s been established, and yet we don’t ever really see them.

It’s a fantastic story that probably would have been completely oversimplified and fumbled by the wrong team. Instead, it’s a silly Halloween tale that became iconic because of the love that was put into it. It does what many horror movies nowadays fail to do: establish a terror from its own storytelling and tone than any series of jump-scares could ever accomplish.